Stubai Trekking Crampons
When it comes to winter hiking, or glacier travel, probably one of the most important pieces of equipment needed in your arsenal is a pair of crampons. Without a sharp set of crampons your likely to slide around, and not really get all that far. If your like me, and are not sure how much glacier or snow travel your going to do, then you probably don’t want to break the bank on your first set of crampons, and rightly so.
Stubai Buckle
While browing at my local gear shop, I stumbled across a pair of Stubai crampons, and the 95 dollar price tag was really appealing. before this, I had never heard of Stubai. Usually I do some research before buying brands I am unfamiliar with but i decided to take the plunge with these. (And I really wanted to do some winter hiking that weekend.) When I got the home I unboxed them and began to look them over in further detail. I was really impressed with the solid steel construction of the metal parts and the points, which i might add felt unbend-able. The plastic portion of the bindings didn’t feel like the cheap plastic you see in most products today, it was thick and bendable. the laces for the bindings kept the crampons securely strapped to my feet though they did seem unnecessarily long.
These crampons fit very well with my Asolo boots, and even in the rare occurances where the straps would losen, they would still stay snugly attached to my boots. I haven’t really wore many other crampons, but I can say that I did stick to the ice like glue. I wore these during my Ricketts Glen Winter Hike and had no problems at all traversing the varied ice terrain. The points on these are very rigid making front pointing very effective, I was even able to shimmy across and ice wall with just my front points into the ice and they did not slip at all. Just keep in mind these are not ice climbing crampons and should not be used as such.
One down side with this particular model is the weight. Steel is not very forgiving in the realm of weight and therefore these do add quite a bit of weight to your boots, but for an extra 20 dollars you can pick up the aluminum version and save some weight. These crampons make a great first step into the exciting sport of mountaineering, and at just under a hundred dollars you really can’t go wrong.
